Tuesday, November 27, 2007

What should I do?

Well... as I work a day as a linux admin I keep having all sorts of fun ideas for something that would make a great game.

Then there is of course all the games that I designed that will never see the light of day.

I was wondering, what should I do with this blog?

1. Leave it here to get bit-rot, the knowledge it contains is worth something but without constant updates it is worthless.

2. Post your game designs so that all 5 to 10 of us can read them and either steal them for our own or by our collective might finesse them in to something truly amazing that nobody will ever program unless they steal the idea off this public forum.

3. Go back to flexing my imagination at http://www.sect.net/ instead. "Nathan, your insight and clever wit were fun for a while but you just don't have the stuff to be in the game biz."

4. Stop talking to myself, nobody reads this anyway.

5 comments:

Wyrm said...

1. and 2.

Knowledge does not turn to worthless just because of lack of updates you know ;) Otherwise most of the knowledge mankind has would be worthless...

And to counter lack of updates, 2. would keep atleast some extra updates comming.

Jordi Fita Mas said...

I vote for 2 too :-)

Patrick said...

You're too fucking paranoid dude, most design pattern "theft" occurs in already finished games anyway, not high concepts. Lets go for 2. :>]

Devin Rose said...

I vote for 2 as well with a suggestion that you also begin to seek out a developer or two with which you can form a game design team that works in your spare time on games.

I have gathered by reading your blog that you do not have a lot of programming experience per se but have good game design and management experience--combine that with programmers who want to create games but are weaker in the design area, and that is a good combination.

So you could seek out these people on the web to collaborate together even though you will probably live far away from each other, and you could discuss your game ideas and how you are finding these developers and then working with them to create your games.

I've done this in my first game on a small scale by going to the World Wide Programmers web (on relisoft.com), where I found a young man from Norway, and we made a Tetris game that gave me experience with object-oriented programming in C++ and him DirectX graphics experience.

Most of all: Take heart and be hopeful for the future. It may be that 10 people read your blog--well, I'm one of them, and I am interested in how you can make a successful venture with indie game development.

Jon... said...

Having never met a bandwagon I didn't want to jump on - I'm voting for 2 as well (what was 2 again?).

Anyway I've already suggested what Devin said, so I'll back his suggestion again...

The reality is (IMHO)

"Skill City was a good idea, it could have worked, but for whatever reason's it didn't - so move on...

You DID get a lot of experience and and at least you tried and gave it your all (which puts you head and shoulders above most people)...

Ok you fell down, to paraphrase - you don't fail when you fall down, you fail when you stop getting up.

You obviously have a lot of passion for the games biz (like the rest of us), so what if you can't draw or program, you can obviously design games. Take that experience, partner with some talented (*cough cough*) programmers and artists and create a casual game that ROCKS....

Sell it to portals, sell it on your own website, heck, give the thing away for free (just decide on what you want out of the experience) and make that your goal - you lucky, you've got a full time job (which your obviously good at), that should afford you a degree of spare time to work on more designs, manage projects etc.

Get a stable of successful commerical games under your belt (maybe even build up some starting capital without having to mug your life savings) and then try again (if you want).

As dear old Winston Churchill once said "Never give up, never never never NEVER give up!"

Ok rant over 8-)

Anyway Nathan - FWIW I've enjoyed reading the blog, if your going to kill it please let us know (so I can know to stop checking in every once in a while!)

Regards

Jon... (techdojo AT gmail DOT com)